Prescott retains right to rule on planning

JOHN PRESCOTT has won an appeal against a High Court judgment which would have prevented the Environment Secretary from making decisions in planning cases.

The ruling, by the House of Lords, means that there will be no need for the Government to transfer big decisions, such as Heathrow Terminal Five, to an independent planning inspectorate.

Five law lords overturned a declaration made in December that the minister's powers, and therefore the planning system as it has operated for nearly 50 years, were incompatible with the Human Rights Act. The High Court had decided that Mr Prescott could not make both policy and decisions.

Under Article 6 of the Human Rights Convention, rights must be determined by an "independent and impartial tribunal". The law lords, however, ruled yesterday that ministers' accountability to Parliament coupled with the possibility of judicial review of their decisions were enough to meet the needs of the Human Rights Act.

Mr Prescott had not argued that he was acting as an independent tribunal. He said, however, that his decisions were subject to review by an independent court.

Lord Nolan said planning control had been entrusted to the minister by Parliament. It was to Parliament that he was accountable. He said: "To substitute for the Secretary of State an independent and impartial body with no central electoral accountability would not only be a recipe for chaos, it would be profoundly undemocratic."

Most applications for planning permission are decided by local authorities. Most appeals are heard by inspectors on the Environment Secretary's behalf. Of 500,000 applications each year about 130 are "called in" by the minister. There are 13,000 appeals to inspectors, of which about 100 go to the Secretary of State.

The cases before the law lords were among the small but important group which Mr Prescott was to decide. Of these, the most high-profile was an application to turn the disused Alconbury airfield, in Cambridgeshire, into a national road and rail distribution centre.

The Ministry of Defence stood to gain financially if Mr Prescott overturned a decision by Huntingdon district council, which had blocked the development. That was not a problem, according to Lord Slynn, but a challenge could be brought if Mr Prescott had wrongly taken into account financial interests of the Government.

Michael Gallimore, a solicitor with the law firm Lovells, said there were other imminent human rights challenges to planning law. But unless anybody brought a successful challenge in the European Court of Human Rights it would be "business as usual".

Malcolm Grant, a barrister and professor of Land Economy at Cambridge, said the decision "defers to the executive and to a model of democracy which assumes a powerful centralised state". The House of Lords had underestimated public frustration on planning decisions, he said.

Tony Burton, of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, said: "This ruling should not be allowed to delay much-needed improvements to community rights." A third party right of appeal was needed against planning permission in perverse cases, such as when a council gave permission itself, or when approval went against a development plan.